Catherine E.RymphRaising Government Children: A History of Foster Care and the American Welfare StateChapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 252 p. $90.00; $29.93 (pbk.).

Abstract

Mention “foster family care” in the context of the US and the thoughts that come to mind are almost all negative: biological families torn asunder by poverty and drugs; neglected and abused children, often African-American, at the mercy of a heartless bureaucracy; and so on. Children who have passed through the foster care system are under-represented among those with post-secondary education and over-represented among the country's prison population; they are far more likely than non-foster children to be prescribed psychotropic medication. Yet, when the foundations for today's foster care system were laid in the 1930s, reformers’ hopes were high that this new approach, managed by professional caseworkers and implemented by trained caregivers, would make a signal contribution to child welfare. Institutionalization of dependent children in orphanages, group homes, and closed facilities would become a vestige of the past, limited to the deeply behaviorally or developmentally flawed. How, Rymph asks, did this example of New Deal social engineering go wrong? She identifies so many flaws that it would not be possible to list all of them in a short review. But a few stand out. The framers of the system had no idea that poverty, inextricably intertwined with race, would become the primary reason for the state to legally remove children from their birth parents. They failed to recognize that, given deeply ingrained devaluation of care work, typically the domain of women, underpaid foster families were essentially subsidizing the system. They did not anticipate the revolution in women's labor force participation, or the reluctance of the state to support measures to reconcile work and family life. Stigma was attached both to paid foster mothers and to birth mothers receiving “welfare” (for example, Aid to Families with Dependent Children or AFDC) because both were perceived to be receiving monetary compensation for motherhood. Foster care became a sort of ersatz family policy, filling the gap caused by the absence of anything resembling a basic minimum income or systematic programs to support families in areas such as housing, health, and child care. The author is careful to point out that there are many examples of engaged case workers, loving foster parents, and children who benefit from the system. But not nearly enough. The most recent tendency, as she describes in the closing pages of the book, is to promote permanency, whether by preserving biological families, adoption, or the recent innovation “fost-adopt” where children are fostered with parents who are looking eventually to adopt. None is a panacea. Preserving biological families can lock children into households from which, by any reasonable measure, they should be extracted. The supply of children for adoption greatly exceeds the demand for them, a situation that was exacerbated with the expansion of adoption from China and Russia. “Fost-adopt” has been criticized for encouraging the breakup of biological families, disproportionately African-American. It threatens what was the overriding objective of foster care as designed mid-century: to temporarily remove children from their biological families until the latter can get back on their feet. The book would make for excellent reading in any course on public social policy. While purely concerned with the United States, it may be of special interest to experts working in the former Soviet Union, where many countries have been attempting to reform the entrenched orphanage system, in which children have traditionally been placed by parents emigrating for work. Index, bibliography.